Let’s assume you’ve been betting for a while and have a few methods for selecting horses that you think are a good bet.
Maybe your methods for selecting your bets involves backing the selections of a profitable tipster (or tipsters), maybe you find your selections using a betting system that you’ve created and back tested or maybe you have chosen to specialise in a specific area of horse racing and have gotten pretty good at finding decent bets for yourself.
You might even use a mixture of some or all of those methods.
Either way, if you are using more than one selection method to decide what you are going to bet on, chances are that every now and then a couple of your selection methods will identify two different horses to back that are running in the same race.
Only one horse can ever win a race (except in the rare occasion of a dead heat), so what should you do in this situation?
My advice would be to back both of the horses. Here’s why…
If you want to be a profitable bettor, the only reason you should ever place a bet is if you believe that the bet represents good value.
In other words you believe that the true chance of a horse winning a race is greater than the odds being offered by the bookmakers would suggest.
While it is only possible for one horse to win a race, it is also possible for more than one horse in a race to be a good value bet.
If both of your selection systems have proven themselves to be profitable over the long term, they have likely only managed to achieve this by consistently identifying good value bets.
So if two of your profitable selection methods are identifying different horses to back in the same race, I see no reason why you shouldn’t go ahead and back both horses.
On the other hand, if the selection methods you are using haven’t proven themselves to be profitable over the long term you shouldn’t be placing any bets at all.
In that case you might want to start looking for some better selection methods. If that sounds like you, why not consider trying out one of the tipsters I highly recommend and back with my own money.
You can see their full results here in the Winners Odds Tipster Portfolio: http://WinnersOdds.com/Tipster-Portfolio
Until Next Time,
Kenny Turnbull